Sales were soft for most of the top comic titles this month, with five out of the top ten and 16 out of the top 25 dropping in sales.Only five of the top 25 comic titles managed to increase in sales between October and November.

But cover prices helped ameliorate the financial impact -- the top seven piece books were all higher than the current base $2.25 price.

The top of the list was where the good news could be found, with three of the top six and four of the top ten titles increasing in sales between October and November.Superman/Batman, Identity Crisis, and Avengers were all up in sales.

Marvel was slightly less dominant than usual, with only one of the top five titles, six of the top ten, and 16 of the top 25 titles.DC had the rest; no other publishers cracked the top 40.

Sales on graphic novels were pusillanimous as well, withthe top title, Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 11, only selling around 8,500 during November.And only four titles, one of them a $3.95 Gemstone, sold over 5,000 copies through Diamond during the period.

The top 25 comic titles during November, along with our estimate of the number sold to comic stores by Diamond during that period are:

157,949Superman / Batman #13

134,840Astonishing X-Men #6

132,384Identity Crisis #6

121,831Superman Batman #14

106,469Superman #211

105,761Avengers #503

101,431Avengers Finale #1

96,820Ultimate Fantastic Four #13

92,133Ultimate X-Men #53

92,051Uncanny X-Men #452

91,075Ultimate Spider-Man #68

90,010Ultimate Spider-Man #69

88,747JLA Classified #1

88,620X-Men #164

87,121Amazing Spider-Man #514

86,273Green Lantern Rebirth #2

84,417Ultimate Fantastic Four #12

81,841Wolverine #22

69,642X-Men End Bk 1 Dreamers & Demons #5

68,992Iron Man #1

68,290Marvel Knights Spider-Man #8

67,225Captain America #1

63,769Batman #634

63,355JLA #108

61,537Teen Titans #18

We are estimating actual sales by Diamond U.S. (primarily to North American comic stores) rather than pre-orders (as we did for the past several years) because Diamond recently changed its reporting and began basing its indexes on actual sales (see 'ICv2 Kicks Off New Top 300 Reporting').We use those indexes and publisher sales data to estimate a sales number for Batman (the anchor title diamond uses in its calculations), and use that number and the indexes to estimate Diamond's sales on the remaining titles. We can check the accuracy of our numbers by comparing the Batman number that we calculate using multiple data points; our numbers for Batman are within 1/10 of 1% of each other, ensuring a high degree of accurcy.

Because of that change, we will not be able to do year over year comparisons until February of 2004, but in general, it's an improvement to have actual numbers to work with rather than preorders, which have significant differences from sales.